Accountability as Contestation: An Interactionist Approach to the Study of Public Accountability

This paper puts forth a new conceptual framework for research on public accountability grounded in the study of contestation. It proposes to shift the analytical focus in accountability research from the existence and functioning of institutionalised mechanisms (the ‘tools’ of accountability) to the acts of contestation that constitute an accountability relationship (the ‘interactions’ of accountability). The shift in focus is necessary to capture how accountability relationships are enacted when decisions of public actors are contested in practice. The framework is coined ‘interactionist’ because it places the accountability interactions between two parties—an actor and a forum—at the centre of empirical research. From this perspective, the purpose is to establish whether an actor silences or engages with contestation in a timely manner, and simultaneously, whether the forum accepts or rejects the actor’s answer as being valid. To illustrate the advantages of the interactionist approach, the paper discusses examples from the literature on central bank accountability. The broader goal is to advance accountability studies by providing a conceptually consistent analytical apparatus that can be applied to a variety of contexts and levels of governance.